Increasing cultural competence for SLP students (Daughrity, 2021)

Purpose: Cultural competence is an essential tool for speech-language pathologists and other allied health care professionals in providing ethical and clinically competent care. Determining pedagogical approaches to teaching cultural competence skills to students training in preprofessional programs is imperative to effectively convey the importance of cultural awareness prior to students embarking on their professional careers.

Method: Forty-five (45) speech-language pathology graduate students were administered a multicultural knowledge quiz before and after a targeted, asynchronous learning module on cultural competence and again 2 months later.

Results: Quiz scores indicated significant findings immediately following a cultural competence learning module with an additional increase in scores at follow-up. Scores were not significant for minority background but were significant for clinical experience.

Conclusions: Evidence indicates a brief, targeted video module can positively impact cultural competence skills for speech-language pathology graduate students regardless of clinical experience. Results suggest a combination of targeted instruction along with repeated clinical experience produces the most significant improvement over time. As the current pilot study was employed to test methodology and results are not generalizable, implications for future pedagogical approaches and research studies with comprehensive methodological approaches are provided.

Supplemental Material S1. An example of the style and delivery of the module.

Daughrity, B. (2021). Exploring outcomes of an asynchronous learning module on increasing cultural competence for speech-language pathology graduate students. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_AJSLP-20-00196

Publisher Note: This article is part of the Forum: Increasing Diversity in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Workforce.